THE MOTHER
57
for a long time staring down into the coffin. They saw the baby's face,
small and compact as a fist, unopened as a bud; and as the women stared
at it they were filled with pity, and also with a feeling of bewilderment.
When a grown person dies you feel that even in death he is still aware
of things, and knows the kind of coffin he lies in, and takes pride in the
homage of his friends. His body is not so strange, because the memory
of life is still in it. But the new baby had lived such a short while, its
body seemed to show such indifference to its own death, such a strange,
still remoteness from everything that went on in the room, that the
women were baffled as they looked at it, and could not even cry for
something that had once been alive.
On the second night that the baby lay dead there was a great
shouting and screaming in the tenement. The women woke from their
sleep and listened. They heard the shrill cries of the mother, the father's
angry voice, and the whimpering of the children. It was a shame, they
thought, that the father couldn't contain his anger, even on a night when
the baby lay dead. Next morning they asked the mother: "What was it,
what was he shouting for last night?'' But the mother sat at the table,
with her
~rms
stretched out before her, palms upturned. Now and then
she moved her head and stared out of the window. The trees in the
backyard lifted their early spring leaves, green and feathery in the sun–
light; and on the walls of the tenement
aero~
the way the shadows of
flying birds fell . . . shadows straight and sudden, like falling leaves.
The mother stared at the trees and the sudden shadow. She kept her
thin arms stretched out before her, the hardened palms turned up, as if
something was written on them, and she was offering it for everyone to
read. "What was it?" they urged her. "What was he shouting for last
night?" The
moth~r
would not speak, but this is what happened.
When she saw that the new baby was dead, the mother was angry.
She lay in bed, thinking how the new baby had tricked her. It had
fed itself on her body, and wrenched her limbs with the pain of birth.
And now it demanded a coffin and a burial plot, now it was only a small
dead thing, demanding more than the living children. She felt her
breasts. They were hard and firm again, the fulness of milk in them
hurt her. She thought of the other children, living mouths crying to
be slaked, mouths to relieve the pain of her breasts, to suck out their
fulness. Then the mother rose and leaned over the b0y. She stuffed the
ripe nipple into his mouth, but the boy would not be suckled. His lips
